Toby J. Sumpter - Desiring GodDesiring God Feed for Toby J. Sumpterhttp://www.desiringgod.org/authors/toby-j-sumpter
enThe Aesthetics of ProphecyToby J. Sumpter<img alt="The Aesthetics of Prophecy" src="http://cdn.desiringgod.org/website_uploads/images/resource-images/8217/full_the-aesthetics-of-prophecy.jpg?1424176929" /><p>Beauty is all the rage. You can’t get three sentences in modern theology without tripping over words like “aesthetics” and “beauty” and “Christianity and the arts.” And in many ways this is a welcome shift. The several-century Christian retreat from the arts seems in many ways on its way to a full reversal. Francis Schaeffer has begotten many godchildren, and they are busy exploring, engaging, and perhaps most hearteningly, <em>creating</em>.</p>
<p>But for all the promising signs of an incarnational Christianity, an orthodox faith robustly celebrated for the senses, I’m still worried about the sell-out potential.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to be the skeptic for the sake of being skeptical. There’s nothing innately virtuous about being a cynic. And I know there are plenty of faithful, courageous believers producing beauty in the world of the arts: from film to poetry to interior design to theater to photography to the culinary arts. I know there are many committed Christian men and women pouring out their hearts in praise to their Maker.</p>
<p>At the same time, I suspect that we are still, on the whole, missing one of the unique features of Christian art — if I dare use the phrase. And this is what I’m calling <em>the aesthetics of prophecy.</em></p>
<h2>Friends of God</h2>
<p>First, biblically speaking, we should understand that a prophet is fundamentally <em>a friend of God</em>. Prophets are not first and foremost entranced mystics or socially awkward desert dwellers or future-telling locust eaters. Prophets are close friends of God. God speaks to them, and tells them what he’s planning. And like a good friend, God wants to know what they think.</p>
<p>God tells Abraham about what he’s planning with Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham pleads with God to remember the lives of the righteous (Genesis 18). God tells Moses that he will destroy Israel and start over with Moses, and Moses insists that this would be terrible PR for the God of the Exodus (Exodus 33).</p>
<p>Prophets have access to God’s presence. They witness the deliberations of God, as Micaiah did, when the Lord had determined to get Ahab killed (1 Kings 22). Prophets speak on God’s behalf and speak to God on other people’s behalf. Because prophets are close friends with God, they can speak for him. And because prophets are close friends with God, they can speak to him for others.</p>
<p>And so, in the first instance, when I speak of the aesthetics of prophecy, I simply mean an aesthetic derived from this loyalty and intimacy with the God of the universe. Christians have been given the Holy Spirit and the word of God in Scripture so that we might share this friendship with the Father and the Son.</p>
<h2>Never Casual</h2>
<p>But secondly, this friendship with God is necessarily <em>intense</em>. God is a jealous God. He is invasive, exclusive, and fierce. There is no such thing as a lukewarm relationship with this God. The friends of God have no casual friendship with this God. From Noah to Jacob to Joseph to Deborah — it’s never casual. It’s all or nothing: worlds ending, families colliding, nations at war. This friendship is extreme. This is why James says that friendship with the world is actually enmity with God, and the Spirit yearns jealously for our affections (James 4).</p>
<p>When the prophets yell, when they cry, when they condemn, when they unleash their scathing invective, they do so as the friends of God, friends of a fierce Lover, friends of a Lover offended, a Lover enraged with jealousy over his unfaithful bride. The prophets have been caught up into this holy drama, and their hearts are full of God’s heart.</p>
<p>Of course the center of God’s heart is expressed in the cross: and there’s nothing tame, nothing casual about a man impaled on a cross. Yes, it means grace, it means forgiveness of sins, but it only means that because it first means horror, because it first means wrath and suffering and a burning, jealous love.</p>
<h2>Shunning Prophets</h2>
<p>Perhaps it is nothing new, but it certainly feels like there is currently a steady wave of Christian objections to the prophetic. The prophetic tone is offensive. It seems extreme, over the top, and unnecessarily combative. What we need, we are told again and again, is an irenic tone, words seasoned with grace. We need conversations and dialogue and round table discussions.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong: there is most certainly a place for all of these things in the body of Christ. And at no point is a Christian free to disregard any of the fruits of the Spirit. But it seems highly suspicious when the theological trends are heavy on beauty and aesthetics, and at the same time, everything is simultaneously trending toward the irenic, the dignified, the slick, the elegant, the speculative, the interrogative. And everything is trending away from the fierce, the fiery, the confrontational, the offensive, the combative, the assertive, the polemical, the declarative.</p>
<h2>Beautiful Savior</h2>
<p>But if the cross is our center, then beauty is the result of anger and love, joy and sorrow, suffering and ecstasy. Beauty rises from the ashes. It is formed out of broken ribs and broken dreams. Christian beauty is always cruciform, arising from a dead man, like an Easter earthquake, like giving birth to a child. I doubt you can call it beautiful if there wasn’t at least a bit of screaming involved, at least a few tears, and some blood and water flowing down.</p>
<p>This isn’t a call to imitate the faux artists of the world that need to gin up crisis and agony by their clownish bohemian rebellion, with the help of cheap liquor and cigarettes. Christians don’t need to <em>pretend</em> they are lost in order to create something beautiful. Christians don’t need to pretend because the gospel is already true. Christ suffered once for sin, rose up victorious over all the darkness, ascended to the right hand of the Father, and poured out his Spirit on all flesh.</p>
<p>If this gospel is true, the Truth comes at us like a freight train, like a tidal wave, like a fierce, fiery Love — like a friendship with the most intense Person in the universe. And the challenge is that somehow artists and theologians alike must reckon with the reality of that.</p>
<hr />
<p>More articles from Toby Sumpter:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/blessings-too-big">Blessings Too Big</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/the-thumbtack-of-faith">The Thumbtack of Faith</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/glory-dust">Glory Dust</a></p></li>
</ul>Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:30:00 +0000http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-aesthetics-of-prophecy
desiringgod.org-resource-8217Blessings Too BigToby J. Sumpter<img alt="Blessings Too Big" src="http://cdn.desiringgod.org/website_uploads/images/resource-images/8010/full_blessings-too-big.jpg?1424178363" /><p>Recently, my son (age 2) looked up at his big sister (age 5) sitting on the bathroom counter next to the sink, raised his little arms and said confidently, “Jump my arms! My catch wu!” [Let the reader be aware that my son says “wu” instead of “you.”] When my daughter laughed and told her little brother that she was too big, he insisted confidently, “Wu not too big. My can catch wu!”</p>
<p>When God said that children were a blessing, he wasn’t kidding (Psalm 127:3). I’ve got blessings doing cartwheels in my living room and blessings smeared on my kitchen nook windows. The signs of this shocking blessedness is all over the place. My wife and I spend our evenings mopping up the remnants of this blessing, regrouping, catching our breath, getting ready for another day of drinking this blessing from the fire hose of five insanely cute, creative, and (let’s admit it) slightly crazy people under the age of ten.</p>
<h2>Part of the Blessing</h2>
<p>But not only are we juggling diapers and naps and studies and bath times and stomach bugs, it turns out that these little people are sinners in need of grace. So in a healthy Christian home, we spend a goodish bit of time correcting, disciplining, training, and spanking. The path to the proverbial woodshed is well worn, shall we say. The thing that is often hard to remember when the two-year-old is going red-faced and screaming, when everybody’s getting their feelings hurt and fussing — the thing that is really hard to remember is that this is part of the blessing too.</p>
<p>It’s easy to think that blessing is all butterflies and sunsets. Children are blessings when they keep their outfits clean, obey cheerfully, and say cute things. But blessing isn’t a simple, paint-by-numbers kit. Without challenges, life would leave all of us (our kids included) a bunch of stunted, simplistic fools. So God in his great love sends us problems, trials, afflictions, and a pack of wild monkeys affectionately known as our children.</p>
<p>So, how is your heart? Do you resent the fact that this is the fourth trip to the woodshed this morning? (And you were planning to get your dishes done!) Were you hoping for a quiet evening after a long day of work but the kids won’t be nice to each other? How will you receive God’s interruption of your plans?</p>
<p>God is sovereign, and he has given you children that fuss and quarrel. If your heart is already bent out of shape, and the next kid that walks by is going to be a sinner in the hands of an angry god, then you’re well on your way to forfeiting the blessing God is trying to give you.</p>
<h2>His Scheme to Bless</h2>
<p>The first task in receiving the blessing of disciplining little ones is seeing what God is up to. He’s scheming to bless you. He’s conspiring to bless your socks off.</p>
<p>Do you see it? When God said children were a blessing, he knew they were conceived in iniquity (Psalm 51:5). He knew they would write on your walls with a permanent marker.</p>
<p>When that old dragon of sin rears up in the hearts of your children, do you think something has gone terribly wrong? Remember, God sends his favorite sons into battle with the dragon. He wants you to fight and get the victory. He wants you to get the blessing, renewed fellowship, the grace of forgiveness.</p>
<h2>Much Too Big</h2>
<p>Finally, for discipline of children to be a blessing, the act itself must be full of Jesus and his gospel of grace. Jesus is the center, the fountainhead of every spiritual blessing. And when the little guy shoves his mom and declares his independence from the empire, something inside you should smile because not only is his high-handed rebellion terribly cute but now you get to preach the gospel to him. If you laugh it off, if you refuse to intervene, if you refuse to discipline, you are refusing an evangelistic opportunity. You are refusing a chance to proclaim the grace of Jesus to your family.</p>
<p>A spanking is not primarily punishment. It’s discipline. We are discouraging one way of life and aiming for an audience with our children. It hurts in this small, temporary way because we do not want them to go down the path of pain that goes on and on. This is why it is love. Come with us, we say, come with us and follow Jesus. He stood in our place and took the death that we deserve. His blood makes us all clean. He destroyed the great dragon so we could be free. Let’s be forgiven. Let’s walk in the light. It’s not really about the tantrum. It’s certainly not about your peace and quiet. It’s about a cross, an empty tomb, and overwhelming grace.</p>
<p>In this way, we see that the blessing of God is actually much too big for us to handle, much too big for us to catch. But it is still a blessing from top to bottom, a blessing in the tears, a blessing in the laughter.</p>
<p>We get married, we pray for children, for a family, and God is sitting up on the counter and we’ve asked him to jump into our arms. We can handle this, we think. We want this blessing. And God smiles and laughs and jumps.</p>
<hr />
<p>Related resources:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/parents-require-obedience-of-your-children">Parents, Require Obedience of Your Children</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/the-power-of-a-parent-s-words">The Power of a Parent’s Words</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/motherhood-is-a-calling-and-where-your-children-rank">Motherhood Is a Calling (And Where Your Children Rank)</a></p></li>
</ul>Sat, 01 Feb 2014 05:00:00 +0000http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/blessings-too-big
desiringgod.org-resource-8010The Thumbtack of FaithToby J. Sumpter<img alt="The Thumbtack of Faith" src="http://cdn.desiringgod.org/website_uploads/images/resource-images/7837/full_the-thumbtack-of-faith.jpg?1424179169" /><p>At bottom, the difference between faith in God and all other alternatives is a choice: to believe or not to believe. But this is no blind leap of faith.</p>
<p>Faith is not irrational.</p>
<p>Faith is not insanity.</p>
<p>Faith is not stepping into the void.</p>
<p>Faith is sanity.</p>
<p>Faith is choosing to see what is actually there.</p>
<p>Faith is the choice to embrace life, the world, God.</p>
<p>Certainly, faith is not exhaustive knowledge or complete understanding. Faith believes certain things that are unseen. But we do not believe the unseen things based on nothing. Faith is not a shot in the dark. Faith is not a good guess.</p>
<p>Faith sees the stars and gapes in wonder. Faith sees a little baby in her mother’s arms and blinks back tears of astonishment. Faith sees even evil, mind-numbing atrocities and aches with revulsion. But these realities do not add up to nothing. They are parts of a story, lines in a poem, and the punch line is God, a good and loving Creator, and a world bracing with beauty, slashed and cracked with evil and sin.</p>
<p>That’s not a stretch. That’s right there in your face, every day.</p>
<h4>Suppression Insanity</h4>
<p>That means that the choice to not believe, the choice to turn away from God is the suppression of these truths (Romans 1:18). In other words, it is not a rational decision. It is a form of insanity.</p>
<p>But to say that refusing to believe in God is insanity is not the same thing as saying it is not understandable. It is an understandable mistake. It’s understandable because it’s the kind of decision that requires telling the truth. And truth telling has a way of shining light into the corners of peoples’ lives that is highly uncomfortable. This is why our rejection of the light is often multilayered. People build complex psychological and emotional barriers to the truth. They are still culpable. They are still responsible, but it’s understandable because there’s sin down in those corners. It’s dark down there.</p>
<h4>The Creator</h4>
<p>To admit that the world has a Creator is to admit that this world has a reason, a purpose. To admit that there is a Designer is to admit that there is a moral order, a functional order, a right and a wrong, a better and worse way to live life. To admit that this world was created is to admit that you have a responsibility for how you have treated others, how you have lived. And the standard for judging your actions is not you. It’s outside of you. And everybody knows instinctively that they have fallen short of the glory they were made for.</p>
<p>So for many, it’s simply unthinkable to believe in God, to believe in a Creator. It’s unthinkable because that would demand thinking certain thoughts that might lead to other conclusions that would eventually imply guilt and responsibility for that guilt. It’s easier to maintain a vague guilt, a vague notion of nobody’s-perfect, and all against the infinite void of evolutionary chaos, which keeps everything sufficiently blurred — we can’t be certain who’s really at fault, so don’t worry about it too much.</p>
<p>As it turns out there’s a pretty sizable army of these relativistic warriors at the moment. The universities are filled with English and Philosophy professors that function as the drill sergeants for this host of guilt-soothers. And the science labs serve up the mysteries, the sacraments of unbelief, insisting that students practice scientific methodologies without actually pressing them into the corners. Pretend the world is ordered. Pretend that logic is meaningful. Pretend that observable phenomena communicate the grace of certainty.</p>
<p>But not too much.</p>
<h4>Don’t Ask</h4>
<p>Don’t ask questions about where it all came from. Don’t ask about beauty. Pretend that the little baby in its mother’s womb is just a mass of protoplasm. It could be a tumor. And if you feel that you are a woman trapped inside a man’s body, that’s okay too. No matter that the only scientifically observable phenomenon is the fact that you’re a sexual predator. We will pass laws, and soon you will be able to use whatever locker room you like.</p>
<p>This is insanity, and that’s why faith has the upper hand. Faith is honest about the world. Choosing to believe the latest version of your pagan-approved science textbook, choosing to believe the high priests of atheism, choosing to believe in vague evolutionary relativism is choosing not to see, choosing not to think, choosing to ignore what is right there in front of everyone.</p>
<p>We don’t know which chapter of the story we’re in. We may have another fifty or two hundred years of this kind of cultural insanity. But be assured, we are not playing on equal footing. It’s not like we all squint into the void, and some of us believe in God and His Word and His way of life and some of us squint into the void and say it’s a lot more complex and muddled and who’s to say?</p>
<p>No, we’re not squinting into the void. We’re looking at waterfalls gushing with life. We’re watching the sun sink into a vast ocean, bleeding with beauty. We’re watching the magical glory of a woman, making another person inside of her.</p>
<h4>A Fortress of Balloons</h4>
<p>Which means the citadels of unbelief are a facade. We’re not up against a fortress of steel, we’re up against a fortress of balloons. And though they glare down at us through peer-reviewed spectacles, using words like ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ and ‘studies-show,’ we can pull out the thumbtack of faith.</p>
<p>Faith sees the world as it actually is. Faith sees the beauty. Faith sees the glory. Faith sees the art, the story, the goodness, and yes, faith sees the evil in the face of it all and knows that something has gone wrong and we have all become part of the problem.</p>
<p>But when the gospel comes, when Jesus comes, He isn’t talking about some other universe, some kind of alien heaven. He’s talking about this world. He’s talking about this beautiful place, and He’s come to forgive our sins, to heal the brokenness, to raise the dead, to restore the glory. And faith sees that. And that’s how faith overcomes the world (1 John 5:4).</p>
<hr />
<p>Previous post from Toby J. Sumpter:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/glory-dust">Glory Dust</a></li>
</ul>Sat, 12 Oct 2013 05:00:00 +0000http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-thumbtack-of-faith
desiringgod.org-resource-7837Glory DustToby J. Sumpter<img alt="Glory Dust" src="http://cdn.desiringgod.org/website_uploads/images/resource-images/7227/full_glory-dust.jpg?1424181293" /><p>We are inextricably embedded in this world, in the material world. The wind scrapes our faces as much as the branches of low hanging trees. Words and images ricochet through space and time like chisels swung against marble, chipping, shaping, creating, destroying. We are inescapably embodied. We are bodies that act and react as we are acted upon.</p>
<p>This means that all of life is already a ritual, already sacramental, already profoundly spiritual. This is because God made the world and upholds it by the Word of his power and by the breath of his Spirit. So where will you go from his presence? Will you hide in a cave, at the bottom of the sea, in outer space?</p>
<p>At the center of this magic world is the Magic Word which holds it all together and keeps it from flying back into the nothingness. That Word is incarnate forever as a Man who sits at the right hand of the Father and visits this world constantly through the person of his Spirit, and through the instruments of his Word and sacraments: testing, trying, cleansing, judging, comforting, killing. But this same Word penetrates the whole world; the glory of God fills the universe like an electrical charge.</p>
<h4>Glory</h4>
<p>This means that there is no such thing as &quot;high&quot; liturgy or &quot;low&quot; liturgy — although because of the sin of liturgical pretense, there are certainly those who <em>think</em> there are such things. Life in this universe, seen with true, evangelical faith, is always high liturgy, always bursting with meaning, bursting with the life of the triune God, bursting with power to shape, to break, to mold, to crush, to save. The world is shot through with the glory of God.</p>
<p>So how will we describe the difference between ceremony and informality? Is there no difference between the “high liturgy” of Easter Sunday worship and the “high liturgy” of a walk in the park? How does ceremony and form and awe relate to the rest of our life?</p>
<p>If the world is already in some sense high liturgy, ablaze with the life of the Trinity, then there is nothing but holy ground. The world is a sanctuary. The universe is a pinnacled cathedral. This necessitates the right kind of fear and panic. But because we are creatures made to laugh and play and sleep, we must find some way to pretend that everything is perfectly fine, natural, normal.</p>
<h4>Asleep in the Sermon</h4>
<p>Some people fall asleep during the sermon, and we make fun of them. But in some sense, we always fall asleep during the sermon; we do that every night. Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament is constantly preaching about God. So it is not as though we are ever safe. There is no place you can go to get out of the presence of God. The world is charged with the presence of the living God.</p>
<p>So how can we deal with this? How can you make love to your spouse in the presence of God? How can you play here, relax here, live here?</p>
<h4>Humbled Awe</h4>
<p>But this is part of the glory of it all. This is the meaning of grace. God made the world for us. He made it so that we would always walk with him, basking in the radiance of his glory, and somehow, at the same time, be perfectly at home with him. It’s sin that distorts this and makes it awkward and unnatural. It’s sin and death that creates the chasm between the awful and the ordinary. And the quest to put these two things back together, to marry heaven and earth is what salvation is all about. It’s about reconciling sinners to the Father, but more than that, the gospel is an invitation to men to open their eyes to see the world as it is.</p>
<p>How do we fall down on our faces and cry &quot;Holy!&quot; and yet sit down in the comfort of the Spirit, believing that we are somehow welcome, somehow we belong, somehow knowing and believing that this is what we were made for? How can we sit back and relax in the garden, knowing all along that it is simultaneously a sanctuary?</p>
<p>The Bible’s word for this is humility. James says, “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble . . . Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up” (James 4:6, 10). The world was created to be both home and sanctuary. The world was created to be both a place that radiates the splendor of the unending glory of God and a place where people could be at home with that glory, a place that would cause people to stop their mouths in shock and wonder, and a place where they might also drift off into a peaceful night’s sleep. The key is humility: the smaller you are, the bigger you are. The tinier and more insignificant you become, the easier it is to see and love both realities.</p>
<h4>Ants Before Everest</h4>
<p>When we have put on our best clothes, played our best music, and walked with our greatest dignity, we are still only human. We are still just people, just men and women and children, with arms and legs and belly buttons. God loves our worship; God loves our praise — provided we have not made an idol of it. But even at our best we are ants at the foot of Mt. Everest pantomiming how big our God is. We are tiny specks on a roller coaster swinging through the galaxies, surrounded by millions of stars. We are children with tongues stuck in our cheeks scrawling with crayons. We are so small.</p>
<p>And that is really what we are doing in our ceremonies, our liturgies. We are confessing that we are just people, just small, broken human beings. And yet we remember that the glorious, omnipotent God became one of us, stooped down for us, embraced us in His love. We are not merely microscopic organisms pounding the door of some ogre’s castle in hopes of mercy. We are the beloved children of God, made in his image, saved by his grace, washed in our Savior’s blood, redeemed forever and ever. We are small, and yet he has set his love on us. And so we take our smallness, our weakness, we take dust and ashes and, like the little children that we are, we draw on each other.</p>
<h4>Glory Dust</h4>
<p>We play in the dirt that Adam was made out of, and we try to draw the best thing we can imagine. And in this world, the best thing we can imagine is the cross of Jesus, where our weakness was lifted up and transfigured into glory. Where our failures and shame were lifted up and owned by the God of the universe; where our Father claimed us forever and ever as his beloved sons in his Beloved Son. This is folly; this is silly. We are only playing like little children in the dust. But it is this very folly that is the wisdom of God; it is this weakness that is the strength of God.</p>
<p>Our ceremonies and rituals are serious, formal plays where we remember how small we are, how weak we are, and how good our God is. And as we humble ourselves in this, we ought to find both realities growing around us: the haunting glory of the transcendent, numinous God drives us to build cathedrals, to kneel, to prostrate ourselves to the ground. It’s as though we are little children trying to show how big God is: “He’s <em>this</em> big,” we seem to say. And we guard the glory with ceremony and order and decorum, with clashing cymbals, high sounding brass, and the blaring, rumbling, roaring organ swelling high above, and the high, crafted melodies of choirs. But done rightly, received rightly, the ceremony ought not make us wooden or mechanical or awkward.</p>
<p>A “high” ceremony celebrating a Christian marriage rightly drives a couple to a holy bed to make a joyful ruckus, enjoying the earthy, ordinary goodness of sex. Understood rightly, glorious ceremony ought to drive us to the informality of drinks and brats on a smoky summer night, or the goodness of God who gives a man a lovely woman who curls herself into his chest on a couch in front of the television, or childish cheeks smeared with peanut butter and jelly and the wrestle mania that follows with dad and the kids: these moments and hours, these unceremonial “liturgies” of life ought to be enjoyed and celebrated for the grace that they are. They are holy and good and ought to be received as heavenly glories and nothing less than sacramental life for the world.</p>
<h4>God Became Dust</h4>
<p>God became a man, and embraced this world and made it holy again through his life, death, and resurrection. The incarnation means that the ordinary is lifted up. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return, but also remember that you in your dust have been lifted up to glory. And because of the goodness of creation, and its goodness restored in the resurrection, it is <em>already</em> lifted up. You are already ascended with Christ. And yet in some way, this ordinary glory (that is now lifted up to the Lord) drives us further up and further in, it still drives us to chase a glory we will never fully realize or comprehend.</p>
<p>Therefore, remember the God who became dust for us and remember how small you are. Remember that we are little kids in the sandbox of God’s universe. And then remember that you have a Father, a loving, faithful Father who has loved you with an everlasting love, and who has sent his only Son to die for you and by his death and resurrection frees you from all your sins. Remember the high calling of low humility. Remember and stand up big and tall, and remember that you are dust: glory dust.</p>Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:00:00 +0000http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/glory-dust
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